unfortunate general for his disastrous failure; and while his own plea certainly does not clear him, yet, with the seeming want of sympathy with him on the part of his superiors at Washington, and with the horde of savages let loose upon him after the capture of Michilimackinac, the key of the upper lakes, something may be said in his favor. His opponent, too, General Brock, was a trained soldier, and a man quick to see his advantage.

Among the Canadians their leader inspired almost boundless enthusiasm. The winning of the battle of Queenston Heights was dearly bought with the death of so valiant a commander, along with that of his faithful aide, Macdonell. Brave Stephen Van Rensselaer was but badly supported by the war authorities of the United States, and the want of vigor of the whole campaign of the year 1812 was only too fitly closed by the empty proclamation of General Smyth, in which he said: "Soldiers! You are amply provided for war. You are superior in number to the enemy; your personal strength and activity are greater, your weapons are longer. The regular soldiers of the enemy are generally old men, whose best years have been spent in the sickly climate of the West Indies. They will not be able

to stand before you - you who charge with the bayonet."

The only notable question of the first year of the war was the employment of Indians by the Canadians. General Hull had threatened no quarter to the "white man found fighting by the side of an Indian." The question is a large one, and at this distance of time more difficult. Perhaps the strongest point in favor of the British position is that given in General Brock's proclamation: "The brave bands of aborigines which inhabit this colony were, like His Majesty's other subjects, punished for their zeal and fidelity by the loss of their possessions in the late colonies, and rewarded by His Majesty with lands of superior value in this province." In the second

* From a photograph, secured through the kind interposition of G. Mercer Adam, Esq., of Toronto.

year of the war (1813) greater efforts were put forth by the United States, though much indifference on the part of the New England States in the war, and a marked inefficiency in the administration of the war department at Washington, still continued. The Canadians, while gaining an advantage at Frenchtown, on the river Raisin, below Detroit, in the defeat and capture of General Winchester by the Wyandot chief Roundhead, had a

serious loss in prestige by the bombardment and capture of their capital, York. The greater part of the small force stationed at York, however, retreated down the lake-shore. The American army also appeared in great force on the Niagara frontier. About the end of May the fortune seemed A successful night attack was made by the Canadians under Colonel, afterwards General Harvey, who also, at a later date, became governor of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. This advantage.

to turn.

* Reproduced from Bouchette's Upper Canada (London, 1832). Cf. views in Lossing's Cyclop. U. S. Hist., 163, 1174.

VOL. VIII. - IO

was followed immediately after by the capture of some five hundred troops by a small detachment of Canadians at Beaver Dams. These disasters led to the retirement of General Dearborn. But as the summer rolled on again the tide changed. The Canadian fleet on the lakes had all along been

SALABERRY STATUE.*

His

a chief dependence. The possession of Lake Erie meant the possession of the western peninsula of Upper Canada. It was the good fortune of the American Commodore Perry to capture the entire British fleet on Lake Erie. This left Colonel Proctor, who had borne his part well on the Detroit frontier, entirely helpless. disastrous defeat, the attack upon him by General Harrison at Moravian Town, and the desperate conflict in which his brave colleague Tecumseh lost his life, are well known. Proctor was afterwards court-martialled and suspended from the service; but the considering his small force, not one half of his opponent's, the badness of the road, and his slow transport service up the Thames, as well as the confusion of his plans arising from the loss of the fleet - would seem to call for a more lenient judgment on the part of posterity.

sentence

On the eastern frontier Canada won laurels. The affair at Chateauguay has always been regarded as noteworthy from the employment of French-Canadians, under their leader Colonel De Salaberry, himself, though an officer of the British regular army, a French-Canadian. Military critics give the closing battle of this year, Chrystler's Farm, on the St. Lawrence, where a Canadian force was completely successful, as the most scientifically fought battle of the war. The close of this year found the Americans in possession of the western peninsula of Upper Canada, but the Canadians full of hope on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence. The last year of the war saw a powerful movement from the United States directed against the St. Lawrence region, but it was ineffectual, and Lake Ontario

[After a photograph kindly furnished by Geo. Stewart, Jr., Esq., of Quebec. The statue was erected by a popular subscription in 1881. Cf. the portrait in B. Sulte's Histoire des Canadiens-Francais. — ED.]

remained in possession of the British. In March of this year (1814) a strong delegation of Indians from the upper lakes, consisting of Ottawas, Ojibways, Shawanees, Delawares, Mohawks, Sacs, Foxes, Kickapoos, and Winnebagoes, arrived in Montreal to swear allegiance to Britain. Their assistance was not so valuable as the encouragement given by the opinion of the red man shrewd observer as he is that the fortunes of war were with their ancient allies, and not in favor of the "Long-knives. The Niagara frontier was the last part of Canadian soil where the struggle continued, and here it was severe. A strong American force captured Fort Erie at the head of the Niagara River. The Canadians were repulsed in an attack on Chippewa, and were again compelled to fall back. But the arrival of General Drummond and strong reinforcements caused an advance, and then the bloodiest battle of the war, Lundy's Lane, was fought in a handto-hand struggle in the dark, for the contest lasted till midnight. Early in November the American force retired from the Canadian side, and the war, so far as Canada itself was concerned, was over. It was a joyful event when the news came that at Ghent, on December 14, 1814, the treaty of peace had been signed.

The three years' contest had an important effect on Canada. Coöperation in defending their country had brought the Canadians into acquaintance with one another, and undoubtedly aroused a certain esprit de corps previ ously unknown. Certain important political consequences, as we shall see, followed from the "war of defence." The war had a most powerful influence in promoting emigration from Britain to Canada, or rather of giving force to the movements already acquiring strength, which had been fostered by Governor Simcoe and others. The Glengarry emigration, begun, as we have seen, from Scotland in 1802 by the priest Macdonell, was but an evidence of a widespread necessity which compelled thousands of the peasantry to leave their native hills and seek the new world. This was called the "Highland Clearances," meaning by the name the economic movement on the part of the landlords of Scotland to take the small holdings of the crofters and make great sheep-runs of them. With the justice of this step, or the great sufferings following to the expatriated people, we have here nothing to do. Suffice it to say that thousands of the homeless Highlanders found shelter on Canadian soil. One of the sympathetic men of the period was the Earl of Selkirk, who, though a nobleman of the Scottish border counties, had an admiration for the Highlanders. In 1804, under his guidance, eight hundred colonists were landed on Prince Edward Island; and shortly after a small body of the same band settled in the extreme west of the peninsula of Upper Canada. But in 1811-15, this adventurous nobleman sent by way of Hudson's Bay the first settlers to the prairies of the Northwest, and founded on the Red River the Selkirk Colony, which no doubt, amid the disputes as to boundaries and the shifting claims, preserved to Britain by this early occupation what forms Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, a part of Canada to-day. Immediately after the war many of

1 See on this settlement, ante, ch. I.

the Highland refugees came to join their compatriots in the Glengarry district, and to form new settlements on Colonel Talbot's domain in Upper Canada. This stream of Scottish immigration was not, in the provinces by the sea, interrupted even by the war of 1812. Nova Scotia and Cape Breton were so occupied that the best lands were taken by 1820, but remoter districts kept on filling up for years after. The close of the war of 1812-15 was also the period of the close of the great Napoleonic wars. The disbanding of many British regiments led to the arrival in Canada of large numbers of military colonists. The close of the war also brought great derangement of trade in Britain, and many operatives from the congested trade districts found their way to the new world. What may be called the Ottawa district, or part of the region known as Central Canada, was thus settled. The district south of the St. Lawrence, in the neighborhood of Montreal, in Lower Canada, and the eastern townships received large numbers of this military and operative population. While this immigration was largely Scottish, the poverty and distress in Ireland resulted in the British government sending thousands of Irish colonists to Upper Canada. Many townships in the unoccupied Ottawa region were thus filled, while the Newcastle district, lying between Lake Ontario and Rice Lake, and to the north of this, was settled by thousands from the Green Isle.

Perhaps the most remarkable immigration agency working in Canada was an association formed in 1825, called the "Canada Company." This great English company acquired upwards of two millions of acres of land in Upper and Lower Canada. The district lying along Lake Huron, hitherto entirely unknown, became the great centre of the company's operations. Two men known in the literary world, John Galt, the author of many works of fiction, and Dr. Dunlop, who is met as a character in Christopher North's "Noctes Ambrosianæ," were prominent officials of the company in Canada. The towns of Guelph, Stratford, and Goderich are centres to-day of what were the great Canada Company's lands. Other private enterprises, usually under government favor, and military settlements, from England, Ireland, and Scotland, brought a population to Upper and Lower Canada that really transformed the forest wastes into scenes of energy and thrift. This was by no means the end of the immigration to Canada, but so important was the influx of this period that from the close of the war up to the year 1835 has been aptly called the "making of Canada." The incidents of this coming of the people are many; and while they are beyond our scope, yet we may mention the terrible cholera plague of 1832-34, which followed the settlers from the old world to the new, and devastated Upper and Lower Canada. Reference might also be made to the altogether phenomenal "Miramichi fire," which in 1825 swept like a hurricane across the northern part of New Brunswick, and left a memory of terror over that whole region.

The political history of Canada, as already said, takes its color from the loyalist and military character of its people. While there is much that is